professors slam German support of Israel

German intellectuals have urged their country to change its Holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel in the Middle East conflict.

Germany needs to make the change because the genocide affected Palestinians too, a group of four German intellectuals said.

Dr. Reiner Steinweg, Prof. Gert Krell, Prof. Georg Meggle, and Jorg Decker made the remarks during a debate at the Netanya Academic College on the future of German-Israeli relations on Monday.

The professors were among 25 signatories to a petition on the issue that was circulated in the German media following the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon.

According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is "one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention." It went on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about "the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable."

The debate, which drew a crowd of some 150 people, took place in the framework of a panel discussion.

Dov Ben-Meir, a former deputy speaker of the Knesset and the event's organizer, said, "They are a minority, but they educate young German minds and we cannot afford to brush their criticism aside as anti-Semitic. We must confront it."

Some 25 German professors co-signed a manifesto published in the Frankfurter Rundschau calling on Germany to stop giving the Zionist regime "preferential treatment," because, among other reasons, the country "helped" establish Israel by expelling Jews from Germany during the rule of the Third Reich.